Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Cheltenham Music Festival ★★★☆☆
The Cheltenham Music Festival may have waned somewhat since its glory days over the last millennium, but it still delivers a great programme of brilliant young artists and compelling premieres. The focus for the 2024 edition was on local boy Gustav Holst, known to millions for his orchestral suite The Planets (first performed in 1918), but little else. It’s a pity, because Holst was a fascinating figure who learned Sanskrit while working as a trombonist and music teacher and was influenced by Japanese and Indian music.
This year is the 150th anniversary of Holst’s birth, so it was certainly the right time for the Festival to reveal that “Holst was more than The Planets” – which they sort of did, but disappointingly coyly. They offered no Indian-inspired pieces, or the odd orchestral piece, Egdon Heath (1928), which surpasses The Planets in harmonic prowess. They did, however, present the quietly stirring Jesus Hymn, and on the final day the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra took a deep dive into the English folk music of this versatile composer.
If you’re allergic to deliberately noisy connotations like “walking merrily on the village green”, the prospect of three folk-inflected pieces in a row from Holst will not appeal. But these wonderful performances, lively without being oppressive and delicate without being precious, may have won you over. Holst’s familiar St Paul’s Suite may have been written for the young musicians of St Paul’s School for Girls, but it requires needle-thin elegance in the diaphanous second movement and angelic purity of tone from the conductor in the surprisingly sinuous, almost Arabic-sounding third movement, and they certainly got it.
Conductor Andrew Manze showed a keen awareness of the harmonic and rhythmic surprises beneath the music’s naive surface, and made us notice them. The rarely heard A Fugal Concerto (1923) was an intriguing hybrid, as if the spirit of Bach had descended into that village square, and the first of the Two Songs harked back to a different, more courtly Englishness than folk music. The evening’s most emotional moment came in the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’ English Folksong Suite, in which the orchestra’s principal oboist played the melody My Bonny Boy with a lovely, aching nostalgia.
After the folk-heavy first half of the concert, it would have been interesting to see how British composers could have incorporated the influence of folk music into a larger symphonic canvas. But when the RLPO presented Mozart’s sparkling Jupiter symphony instead, no one could have complained. Andrew Manze is a highly experienced conductor of Mozart and felt no need to make his mark with ear-pleasing quirks of tempo and expression. He let the music breathe naturally, making sure there was plenty of air and light in those bold, balanced phrases, and letting our ears relax by leading them into harmonic surprises with the slightest pullback. The joyful climax of the final movement was not always perfectly nimble-fingered, but it certainly shone with grandeur. IH
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Classic Pride, Barbican ★★★★☆
A quick opener, a new commission, a compact concerto, a contemporary work and a short symphony with choir – at first glance, this could have been any other mixtape-style Barbican concert. But rainbow lights twinkled around the stage and the podium was draped in the LGBTQ+ flag. The clothing choices were brighter, more sparkly. I adjusted my own sequined combat trousers and noticed someone else wearing the same ones.
This was Classical Pride, the second instalment of Oliver Zeffman’s cleverly designed celebration. Last year’s concert, also at the Barbican, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, was, surprisingly, the first of its kind in Europe. Sunday night’s performance was the culmination of an extended five-day series featuring musicians from UK conservatories, community choirs and another first, Classical Drag.
Copland’s stirring Fanfare for the Common Man heralded the arrival of presenter Nick Grimshaw. Classic FM’s idiosyncratic gala concerts and sporadic Proms broadcasts had long demonstrated how difficult it was to provide a live context for complex music, but Grimshaw’s informality often worked, guiding newcomers and setting the programme.
As music organisations struggle against funding cuts nationally (such as the English National Opera) and locally (the CBSO), Zeffman’s ability to secure growing support is all the more impressive. He has secured several Classical Pride commissions from major composers, including Jake Heggie’s Good Morning, Beauty, which premiered here. Pumeza Matshikiza’s creamy soprano brings the joyful love song to life with Bernsteinian flourishes, accompanied by the orchestra (the Barbican house band London Symphony Orchestra, with Zeffman conducting).
Pavel Kolesnikov, who performed at last year’s event (with his partner Samson Tsoy), returned as a soloist in Saint-Saëns’s second piano concerto. The virtuoso is tempered by a dazzling opening, a dreamy second theme and a witty, hectic finale. Kolesnikov proved himself as a ballet pianist – in Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale, his arms danced into the space above the keyboard, never violating his technique.
Some might attribute this to the “queering of performance,” an idea that encouraged originality in musical expression. The composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990) summed up this spirit when he told an interviewer: “What I’m trying to achieve is to be what I am—fully black, fully musician, fully gay.” While there was no Eastman in the main hall—Jessie Montgomery’s arrangement of Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla was performed in the foyer before the concert—Cassandra Miller’s Round signaled its radical musical minimalism, with trumpets positioned in the balcony and an urgent, repeated motif. Voices swirled, program pages turned.
Russell Thomas – in town to sing Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca at the Royal Opera House – joined the LGBTQ+ Community Choir for Szymanowski’s dramatic Symphony No. 3 Song of the Night, a texturally dense, stirring work – Thomas’s tenor lost in the weaving. The counterpoint to this joyful evening was a reminder that Pride is a protest movement, because rights are still not universal. To that end, all proceeds from Classical Pride go to Rainbow Road, Amplifund and the Terrence Higgins Trust. CJ
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Sound Within Sound, Southbank Centre ★★★★★
A sound within a sound – a strange idea. How can one sound contain another? As we emerged into our first gig at Sound Within Sound – Southbank’s festival of experimental music from around the world – this became clear. It means sounds of a fascinating alienness: the rumbling, gurgling and hissing of water, insects and bells, complex and multi-layered, like one shape opening up to reveal another. Sounds that, after a moment of resistance, you sink into with pleasure, a sense of being mysteriously connected to something centuries old.
It was Jitterbug, by Annea Lockwood, a New Zealander who gained brief fame in the late 1960s for recording the sound of burning pianos. “It’s not very green!” she admitted in a post-concert chat with festival curator Kate Molleson, but she has since more than made up for it by settling in Montana and turning to nature for inspiration. Lockwood is one of many “outside modernists” who have been as bold in their reinvention of music as the Western luminaries who dominate official histories. Ten of them, including an Ethiopian nun who went to a Swiss finishing school and a Brazilian composer who created a menagerie of new instruments, appear in Molleson’s 2022 book (which gives the festival its name) – all of whose music is heard on the Southbank, some for the first time in the UK.
Among the mysterious sounds in Lockwood’s music, many of the sounds were field recordings of rivers and insects, subtly modified and dispersed by the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s exquisite sound-diffusion system. Over these were the plaintive notes and almost silent sighs and scratches of the violinist Angharad Davies and the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. They played these tiny sounds with as delicate care as a pianist would place a note in a Mozart sonata, and the expressive results were just as powerful – but in a different way. A Mozart sonata evokes memories of all the other sonatas one has heard before. Here, the groans of the cello and violin seemed like a freshly minted but still ancient, nature sound.
After this, it was a shock to be immersed in the tinkling, austere, clockwork world of Cuban composer José Maceda’s Music for 5 Pianos. Maceda was drawing inspiration not only from his own homeland but from folk music from around the world, and he was dreaming of new musical worlds as daring as those of the West. Played with extraordinary precision and sensitivity by the five pianists of Apartment House, conducted by Jack Sheen, this piece revealed both sides of this extraordinary man.
The enthusiastic flurries from one piano to the next sounded like a village fair; the bell-like chords and interlocking patterns seemed to point to the stars. It was miles away from the nature mysticism of Lockwood, but the grandeur and innocent freshness were just the same. Overall, it was a wonderful start to a festival that harkens back to the days when Southbank was habitually gritty. Let’s hope it’s a sign of things to come. IH
The festival will continue until July 7. Tickets: 020 3879 9555; southbankcentre.co.uk